


Crash

by pipistrelle



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-23
Updated: 2014-08-23
Packaged: 2018-02-14 10:05:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2187663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The TARDIS is in trouble, Amy is angry, and the Doctor finally gets it right. A moment from somewhere in Series 5.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crash

**Author's Note:**

> So Capaldi's first episode airs today. I am... not sure I'm going to watch it. I think I'll probably see what the internet thinks before I jump headfirst into a new Moffat series. He's disappointed me too many times, I'm wary of trusting him now.
> 
> But as part of the lead-up to the new series, BBC America has been replaying all of series 5, which reminded me of when my favorite show was still my favorite. So here's a fluffy series 5 ficlet I wrote back in 2011, posted now for the first time. (I may also end up cross-posting some of my old ff.net series 5 stuff to this page.)
> 
> Here's to what I hope will be a wonderful new series, and all the fun and frolic and optimism and adventure that I've gotten out of Doctor Who. Cheers!

Coming in to the diamond shores of Bright Zelthion they have a bit of a rough landing ("Crashing! We're not crashing. I never crash --" but the rest of the Doctor's protests are lost as a glowing cylinder bursts belowdecks). Somewhere in the midst of being thrown violently around the console room Amy lands with her back to the outer doors and manages to grab onto a railing, clinging to it for all she's worth. There's another tortured scream from the console, another sickening lurch and something under the grating bursts into blue flame, filling the ship with smoke.

"Doctor!" Amy yells. The smoke is reddish-green and oily, and it's devouring the cabin like a living thing, until all she can see is the railing she's clinging to. She tries to shout again but accidentally inhales a wisp of the stuff and starts coughing, her throat burning from the acrid sting of it, her vision blurring until even the smoke disappears.

The ship shudders again, almost shaking her loose from the railing. "Doctor," she croaks, too quietly, got to be louder, he'll never hear her over the roar of the engines --

Then the Doctor comes hurtling out of nowhere, trailing smoke, and lands with a crash next to her on the doorframe that's somehow become the floor. "Are you ready?" he shouts into her ear.

"Ready for what?" she shouts back, but he's already wriggling his way up the door against the suddenly crushing pressure. He's somehow managed to fumble his screwdriver out of his pocket and sonics something out of her sight, then wriggles back beside her again. "Here we go!" he roars, and gives the doors below them one solid thump --

\-- and the doors split, spilling them out into air. The TARDIS is gone, the smoke and fire are gone and there's only infinite freezing empty space, vast inrushing wind and a spinning scarlet sky and bright blue water, now above them, now below. The Doctor's hand finds hers, somehow, and they cling together, plummeting endlessly, and she can just barely hear over the roar of the raging wind of their fall --

" _Geronimoooooooo_!"

Amy closes her eyes.

* * *

The diamond shores of Bright Zelthion are not really diamond. That's actually the last thing they could be, because there's barely any carbon at all on this planet, there's actually a Zelthonian black market in graphite pencils and greenhouse gases. The shores and cliffs and dunes are actually gravitite, which is a silicon mineral-plant that's perfectly normal until you approach it at a speed high enough to shatter it, at which point it warps space-time (which, when it's moving, people call gravity) so that your speed isn't so high anymore.

At least, that's what the Doctor tells Amy when she's picked herself up after falling from the stratosphere and demands to know how they're still alive.

"And you knew that, right?" she asks, eyeing him suspiciously as he ignores her, staring at the vacant, glittering horizon. "You knew that the whole time, that if you hit the 'eject' button we wouldn't actually be killed?"

"What are you going on about, Pond, 'course I knew," the Doctor says absently, lifting a hand to shield his eyes from the brilliant refractions of the sun on the gravitite dunes. A wisp of smoke curls from the cuff of his jacket where it was charred by the speed of their re-entry. "Now, if I was a wounded time machine, where would I go to hide..."

"Wounded? Doctor, what happened back there? What's wrong with the TARDIS?"

"I don't know," he says slowly. "Overshot the temporal penumbra of the planet's third moon, tripped into a bit of a radiation belt, nasty stuff, it'll turn your metatheoretical desynthesizer to ash -- unless of course you haven't one. Still, it must have really done a number on her." He spins on his heel, searching the middle distance, his eyes sick with fear. "And now she's out there somewhere, hurting and alone. Poor old girl."

"Poor old girl," Amy repeats softly. She's bruised all over from the crash and the landing, but she's starting to feel another ache beneath her skin and nerves, a dull insistent pain that springs from the hollow place in her head where the hum of the TARDIS engine has been. That noise which is so much more than a noise, that gentle and affectionate current, has been settling into her mind like sediment drifting to the seafloor, like falling snow; and it's become so much a part of her now that she had stopped noticing it, letting it whir endlessly on with her heart and breath. Now, for the first time she can remember, it's stopped, or at least gotten too quiet for her to hear.

The flat plain they landed on reflects heat like a desert, but Amy shivers. "All right, let's go find her then," she says. "Which way?"

The Doctor licks the tip of a finger, and holds it up to test the wind that isn't blowing. The transparent blue sand lays still around them as though it has not moved for a million years.

"That way," he says after a long moment, pointing towards a barely-perceptible curl of smoke in the scarlet sky. Amy steps forward and reaches for his hand, and together they start walking.

After what feels like hours of following the distant wisp of smoke, which gets thicker and darker as they get closer, they crest a small rise and finally see the wreck of their time machine crashed in the valley below.

The Doctor takes off at the sight of it, nearly falls on his face, and ends up skidding down the hillside, brilliant gravitite pebbles clattering in his wake. Amy picks her way down after him, and by the time she reaches him he's pressed his cheek to the TARDIS door, his eyes closed and brow furrowed in concentration, his hand moving in slow soothing circles on the wood.

"There, there," he murmurs, and this close Amy can hear the slow, soft stuttering of the engines, faint and failing. She winces at the pain and despair in that sound, and takes a step forward, reaching out to place her hand beside the Doctor's on the ship's side.

"Don't touch it!" the Doctor snaps.

"Why not?" Amy asks, not moving. "You're touching it." Her hand is inches from the wood now, and she can feel heat radiating out from it. The frosted windows are glowing, flickering with a dull livid orange, and Amy wonders if the console could still be on fire.

"Amy," the Doctor warns. When she doesn't respond he lets go of the TARDIS and grabs her outstretched hand, drawing her back up the rise, away from the ailing machine. "The time rotor's torn to shreds, I can feel it from here, and that means the whole ship is flooded with temporoflux radiation. We used to have swimming pools full of the stuff when I was a kid, but if you get anywhere near it it'll turn your DNA to tatters of gibberish. So... don't."

"All right, note taken. So can you fix it, then?"

"'Course I can fix it, I'm a Time Lord, Time Lords fix TARDISes, it's what we do. Just got to think." He starts pacing up and down, fidgeting with his bow tie, scuffing a tight square midway between Amy and the TARDIS. "Right. Busted time rotor, that can heal, scarred metatheoretical desynthesizer, that's been rubbish for ages anyway, chameleon circuit, who needs it? No, no, bigger problem -- the bigger problem is the radiation, flooding the TARDIS like a boat takes on water, it weighs you down, anchors you in the time-stream, disrupts your temoporal flux capacitors --"

"So can you bail it out?"

"What?" the Doctor demands, twirling to face her.

"You said the radiation is like water sinking a ship, yeah?" says Amy. "So can you just -- bail it out? Is there a way to get rid of it, a radiation-drain or something?"

"Bail it out," the Doctor mutters to himself. "Bail it out, lighten the load. Backup systems are useless, haven't been in good condition for ages, stasis fields won't work -- we need a radiation-drain, a sink, a bucket, an -- ooh. Ah! Ah-ha!" He darts forward and hugs her, nearly crushing the air from her lungs. "Brilliant! Well done, Amy Pond, well done! The atmospheric controllers in the regeneration chamber can sweep for non-Schroedingerian waves, vent all the radiation, and bingo! We're on our way, in time for High Tea on Harsimus! We'll, we're always in time for tea." He grins, then turns and dashes down the hill again and starts rummaging frantically through his pockets for his key. "Just got to pop out to the Void for a second or two, get all the radiation out where it won't do any harm. Can't do it here, the gravitate would wither and be very, very unhappy... she can't take off like this but if I can get a tachyon tailwind I just might be able to …"

"And I'm meant to -- what, stay here then?" Amy shouts down at him.

He stops with his key halfway in the lock and looks round at her, startled. "Well, you can't very well come along, then you'd be nothing but a little glowing pile of goop. Go on, have a look around, admire the scenery -- you won't have much time to get bored, it's just a quick thing, I'll be back in..." A pause. His back is turned to her, but Amy can almost see his eyes widen. "Oh."

"Go on," Amy dares him. "Say it."

"I'll be back in five minutes," the Doctor says slowly, looking at her with comprehension and confusion warring for control of his expression.

"Yeah," Amy says, and crosses her arms over her chest, determined to let him think she's angry, not terrified. Anything but terrified.

The Doctor stands still for a long moment, then slips his key back into his pocket and trudges up the hill until he's standing in front of her, his shoes sunk into the diamond sand, his eyes a little lower than level with hers. She's determined to let him think that she's angry, furious, but then he holds out one hand, palm up, and she gives in almost immediately, gripping it tight. His hands are dry and cool and strong, and soon he's holding both of hers, twining their fingers together.

"I'm sorry, Amy, but I have to leave you here," he says earnestly. He's avoiding her eyes, staring down at the ground and only darting brief glances at her face. "I've got no other choice."

"I know," Amy says. She can feel the pressure of tears beginning in her throat, but her voice doesn't waver. She knows that he's right, that if she doesn't let him do this they'll be stranded, possibly forever; and if she insists on going with him it will be suicide. She knows all this, and she knows it's childish to be so upset, to be swallowing tears and taking it out on him by throwing old mistakes back in his face. But suddenly she's feeling very childish, and he seems to understand.

"When I came with you I swore not to let you out of my sight again," she growls. He's about to point out that she breaks that promise all the time -- every time she closes her eyes, actually, never mind all the times they've been separated on a planet -- but then he doesn't, because he knows what she means. She doesn't want to let him out of her timeline, out of her reality, out of her universe; and she's right. Physical separation is nothing, she knows that he'll tear down anything on the slow path to reach her -- but once there's time between them...

But Time is not the boss of him.

He can't think of anything to say, so he gives her the only promise he can, the only promise he hasn't broken yet. "You know me," he says softly. "I always come back."

She squeezes his hands for a moment, gathering strength, then suddenly pulls out of his grip. "Go," she says curtly. "Go on, go fix the TARDIS, get us off this godforsaken rock." She glances around at the splendor surrounding them and gives a small, brittle laugh. "Maybe we'll go somewhere with flowers next, okay Doctor?"

"Okay," he says, and sets off again down the hill.

"And Doctor!" she shouts when he's halfway down. He turns, and she glares at him. "I swear, if you keep me waiting here for hours and hours, I'll --"

"I know!" he calls, and it's a good thing he does. She doesn't know if she could have come up with a threat strong enough.

She waits until he's climbed into the TARDIS and closed the doors, then she sits down on top of her little hill. As the engines kick into a painful, fragmented reprise of their normal roar, she pulls her knees up to her chest, digging her toes into the sand.

The TARDIS wobbles, wavers, and is gone. The vaccuum of its leaving pulls at the still air, making sparkling grains of diamond sand dance in the space where it had been.

The sand grains settle, slowly, slowly. Seconds pass.

Amy breathes out, one huge sigh, and doesn't breathe back in again for as long as she can. Tries not to think about spending the rest of her life stranded on some shiny rock in space, billions of years and miles from anything resembling home.

She doesn't own a watch, and her cell phone was gobbled up by solar flares a few days ago in the Horsehead Nebula. Counting is useless, she can't focus. Her heartbeat is erratic and fast.

A scattering of sand falls a few inches down the hill.

She doesn't even have to worry about spending a lifetime here; two years is enough to worry about. Two years alone, among aliens, assuming there are any aliens on this planet, assuming they don't eat her or sacrifice her or something, assuming she isn't deserted in a diamond wasteland where she'll starve to death within the week.

A bird of some sort, just as blindingly bright as the ground, wheels in the distance and vanishes.

She feels seven again, so incredibly small, and as the Doctor doesn't come back and doesn't come back, all of her grown-up strength drains away and it becomes all she can do not to cry.

It's been minutes now, she's certain, although time seems to have taken on that peculiar stretched-out quality that it has on the edge of sleep and waking. Alone in the vast emptiness of the diamond desert, she's dreaming.

The Doctor will come for her. He always does.

(A treacherous part of her whispers, _eventually_.) 

* * *

 At first she thinks she really is dreaming, or that she's listening so desperately that she's twisting the rush of falling sand, the cry of a distant alien bird; but no, it's that noise, that glorious noise of time and space gently tearing themselves apart, the sound of salvation.

For one heart-stopping moment the insubstantial blue silhouette is hard to see against the blue of the diamond sand, but then the edges grow more solid -- and there it is. The TARDIS, her TARDIS, the angry orange glow gone from the windows. She nearly cries.

And then the doors are flung open and the Doctor tumbles out, his face and jacket streaked with soot, his hair at all angles. "I'm here!" he whoops, jubilant. "I did it!" He's falling over himself trying to climb the little hill, to reach her; she meets him halfway down and they crash into each other and stay there like they've just escaped from death. After a second he pulls away and looks her over, his face too close to hers, his hands darting back and forth from her cheeks, to her shoulders, to her waist. "I am here, right?" he asks anxiously. "Here's now? I mean, now, or then, or soon -- you're not a lizard, or pregnant, or forty-seven --"

"Do I look forty-seven?" Amy laughs, and hugs him again. This time he stays still, burying his face in her hair and just breathing -- like these five minutes had been hard on him, too (or however long it had been for him. She doesn't ask).

"You did it," Amy sighs. She eases out of the hug and peers over his shoulder at the quiet TARDIS. "Did it work? Is it -- I mean, is she any better?"

"Still broken, but she'll mend," the Doctor answers. His hand finds hers, and Amy slides down the hill after him and waits while he unlocks and flings open the door. "There you are, Pond -- TARDIS, sweet TARDIS. A few days resting in the void, some tinkering around with the old sonic, and it's off into the universe!"

"Somewhere with flowers," Amy reminds him as she heads inside. The Doctor stands looking around at the sparkling plain for a moment, then smiles and heads after her. "Somewhere with flowers," he agrees.

The door swings shut behind him. The gravitite dunes echo with the off-key wheezing of the engines, and then they are gone from that place.


End file.
